Photoquarium Blog

Awesome, Aw … wait for it … wait for it …. SOME

I don’t think I could do justice to this post by summarizing it so I won’t.

If you have a few minutes to read this post I really encourage you to do so. Also post your comments here about the article, I would love to hear everyones take on this.

I’m off to read a bit on “complex adaptive systems theory” and “Evolutionary Stable Strategies”.

http://www.noop.nl/2009/02/the-decline-and-fall-of-agilists.html

During one of my many discussions with James, he brought up the question “What makes a good developer?” I didn’t have any really good answers but, as most things, someone else had encountered a similar question that has given me a bit of insight. Davey Brion wrote a post on his blog ElegantCode on Ethics In Software Development:Pragmatism Over Dogmatism where he describes what he thinks is the primary goal of a developer and how writing crappy code (or maintainingcrappy code over fixing it) is counterintuitive to the goals of a developer.

A software developer’s primary goal should be to create value for the users of a system. Value can mean a lot of things here. First and foremost, it should be about things that users actually experience. Features, ease of use, performance, etc. You can get all of those with crappy code, but that leads to a situation where you won’t be able to sustain that value in the long term. A system can be very useful to its users, but if the code is in such bad shape that it can’t easily be maintained and extended with new features over time, the value of the system will slowly reduce. New features will introduce new bugs. Bug fixes will introduce new bugs. Eventually, the system starts to collapse under its own rot and the dreaded rewrite commences. Nobody really wants this, do they? If you write good, clean code from the beginning, you can usually avoid these problems.

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Sometimes you encounter things at just the right time. This article is one of those things at the right time. Please read this article if you have ever had to deal with legacy code and muttered under you breath, “Can’t we just scrap this crap and start over”, when trying to fix an issue. Below is my spin on it for the situation I am in.

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This article is a great little read on the “clash of craftsman and businessman” as it pertains to the software field.

I think we are all (or at least I hope we are all) battling between doing what we know is going to give us the best product possible and just getting the product out. So basically battling between being a craftsmen and a just a producer.

I was on twitter the other day and some twitted (is that a word) about an author teleseminar that they had phoned into to listen to. It was with Seth Godin the author of The Dip and Tribes and hosted by Elizabeth Marshall. I just bought his book Tribes and so I thought I would like to hear this but I really didn’t want to phone in.  So I went and registed for the teleseminar and after it was done they emailed me a link to download the mp3. 

Anyway I listened to one of the teleseminars and it was great, a bunch of authors getting together to discuss their works and expanding on their ideas. Basically a coffe shop discusion on their ideals. So judge for yourselves and check it out. If you want full access to the mp3’s then just sign up to Elizabeth Marshall’s website and it will send you a password to access the library. 

Enjoy

At my day job we are in the midst of a pretty big change in the way we are interacting internally within out systems. To date we have been interacting with a really ad-hock method which has caused a lot of dependencey issues and headache, especially when trying to upgrade anything.

So on our path toward SMWDA or Stable Modular Well Documented API’s, I have some across this article on the MSDN site. Now don’t let the fact that it is in MSDN Magazine and written by someone that develops on Microsoft’s platform deter you from reading it, it is a good read. It will also give you a little bit of an insight on the direction our code bases should be going.

Open Closed Principle

I was going to give a quick summary but the article isn’t that long and it does a better job than I can.

Here it is my weakest link, my deepest confesion, the truth behind my madness. I have a problem completing things.

Where, you ask, does this confessional come from? Well I read this blog post by Brian Auer on Epic Edits, My Weakest Area of Photography. This post was exactly what the title says, his weakest points in his photography and how he is going about to improve on them. This got me thinking about my weakest point in photography and life but that is to deep for this blog and we will stick with photography.

Post Processing

I would say this is one of my most inconsistent parts of my photo process. I go out and take hundreds of photo’s and instead of taking them off the camera right away and starting the sorting, processing and ratign of my photo’s I let them sit there and forget about them for a while. This is bringing me to a mountain of images that I either forget I have or get overwelmed with when I try to start the actual process.

How I am going to fix it

Organize – Getting To grips with image management

Organize – Getting to grips with image management 2

Organize – See it through

Printing Photo’s

This on is along the same lines as the previous in that it is a procrastination issue as well. I am alway saying that I need to print my photo’s be it as a framed photo for my wall or as a photobook that I can put on my coffe table for myseld and others to enjoy.

How I am going to fix this

Posting online

I have my photoblog on photoquarium that I post to in spurts but not consistent enough. Also I need to post to my flickr account as well as othere sites like vazaar. I need to get my photo’s more exposure and critisism, I am not sure how I can progress and get better if I don’t get opinions on my work. Maybe I should spend more time in places like photophlow where I can chat with people and get my photo’s critiqued there.

For all of you out there that need or want to read up on software engineering or just want to pad their geek library with books that will get noticed, check out this list of The Top 100 best Software Engineering Books, Ever. 

This is a huge list and maybe you don’t agree with all these books as a “best ever” but it will give you some books to keep in mind as a start to increase you knowledge. Also he posted a follow up to this post here. Enjoy.

 photo credit: blu_blue

I am sure that anyone that has even remotely tried to follow my blogging will have noticed that I haven’t been that consistant. Posts have been spuratic to say the least. 

I am hopefully going to rectify that and start disceplening myself more to publish post on a more regular basis. To my defense though, I have been posting on my companies internal blog and I just realized why try and post to two blogs when I can just take these internal articles and post them here. I will however sanitize them so that if there happens to be any sensitive data  (names, numbers, project specifics, etc) will be generalized orr take out. 

So starting tomorrow I am going to be publishing the these posts ( I don’t think I can them articles) and hopefully this will get me in the habbit of posting one article a week. 

Lately there have been a few blog posts that I have read about whether to relay the benefits or features of a product to the user in an attempt to give them the best tools to choose your product. Some circles believe that you should list the benefits that a product produces instead of features since benefits can be understood easier by clients instead of a list of features (which can and most times are a technical list and confusing to the end user).

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